No Maps on My Taps

TCM's prime time lineup tonight is dedicated to the 30th anniversary of Milestone Films, a company that releases lesser-known stuff to DVD. I haven't heard of the first two titles, although "Archival Screening Night" at 10:30 PM sounds more like a documentary on archiving movies or found footage. I don't know, since I can't find a page about tonight's lineup on TCM's site. However, at 12:30 AM, there's the documentary No Maps on My Taps. It aired a couple of months back when TCM ran a spotlight on tap dancing in film, so I recorded it then, and seeing it on tonight's lineup, made a point of watching it to do a post today.

The documentary was made in the late 1970s. Three older tap dancers: Chuck Green, Bunny Briggs, and Sandman Sims, are getting together at a Harlem nightspot to do a show backed by Lionel Hampton's band. This is a "challenge" show, where each of the three will try to outdo the others in terms of tap dancing -- and since they'd all been performing since the 1930s, they certainly have a lot of skill.

A fair amount of the documentary is about the performers backstage on the night of the performance, as well as footage of the performances; I got the impression from watching that this wasn't a one-night only show. But there's another half in which each of the three dancers discusses how he got into tap dancing, and the history of the genre as it was in the 1930s with dancers like Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, who famously danced with Shirley Temple.

For anybody who's into tap dancing, No Maps on My Taps is a must see. I'm not particularly into tap dancing, but I enjoyed the movie and I'd certainly recommend it too. Tap fans will probably wish there was more footage of the dancing, but I have to admitted I preferred the old guys talking about how they got into dance, so I think there's something for everybody here.